Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Something I've been hearing: "First they are taking down statues... what next, are they gonna burn books? You shouldn't erase history!" My response:

The act of a local, state, or national government putting up statues is not a way of MARKING history,it is a way of commemorating, or CELEBRATING, particular people or events. Sometimes it is a way of commemorating innocent victims of something very bad that happened, or celebrating a group of anonymous people, but more often it is an endorsement of, and praise to, particular individuals. This is different from historical markers, that are all over the country, which flat-out mark the history of something that happened in a particular place. Do you believe, for instance, that the world will forget the history of James Earl Ray, assassin of MLK, unless we put up a statue of him? Of course not, and to do so would be outrageous, especially if it was on public property like a courthouse, because it would clearly be a celebration of him.

"But," some would respond, "taking down Confederate statues -or any statues -is defacing the past, since those statues are a reflection of the times in which they were made." First, I would point out that most of these statues, when removed, are taken to museums... what could be more historical preservationist than that? Second, times change, as do attitudes, and we should be cognizant of what values our local governments choose to memorialize. What you as a private citizen choose to place on your property, or on your person, is completely different from what should be displayed on government or public property.

And I've heard some say that, in placing 21st century values on 19th century things, we are guilty of "presentism"... people should be judged by the norms and mores of their own time. To which I reply: wherever you are in the South, there was a sizable minority of people in your town during the Civil War who opposed the Confederacy and thought it was wrong. Who looked at the whole thing, essentially, kinda like we do now. So the "presentism" argument does not fly.

Finally, I've heard people claim that taking down statues that represent something negative is "whitewashing" history. Just because we don't like something in the past is no excuse for trying to change or erase it, they would say. Many, in fact I'd guess the vast majority of, people who say that believe that the Civil War was not really about slavery but about a constitutional disagreement over states' rights, and even that slavery was not as bad as people say. This demonstrates an incomplete and fundamentally wrong view of the Civil War. Having all these Confederate statues around didn't help those people understand history much, did it? In fact, I'd say they worked AGAINST an accurate understanding, because they perpetuate the Lost Cause myth.

Now I'm going to go back to presentism. Because if you make that argument -if you say we have to look at how people felt at the time these statues went up -you have to be honest, or get educated, about when and why they went up. Confederate statues and flags in public places have a specific history, and it starts decades after the Civil War. In fact, the vast majority of them appeared in one of two eras: either the early 1900s to the 1920s, or circa 1950 to 1965.

Era One was the decades after the establishment of Jim Crow segregation laws, a time when lynching was rampant because "uppity" blacks were not allowed to exist. A time when groups like the NAACP were founded to fight those things and protect the rights of black Americans; a time when the KKK came back into the spotlight and reached its peak in American history; a time when black men served in the military in WWI and came back more ready to organize, leading to even more lynchings and race riots.

Era Two was the Civil Rights era, when segregation was being challenged by black activists, and the national government was starting to put chinks in Jim Crow's armor (Truman desegregating the military by executive order, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, Eisenhower sending troops to impose order on the desegregation of the Little Rock high school). When the Democratic Party announced civil rights as one of the planks in its platform in 1948, the same summer Truman integrated the military, a large number of Southern Democrats left and formed their own third party (the "Dixiecrats") with their primary stated purpose being to preserve segregation and white supremacy. They used the Rebel flag as their symbol, and it started showing up everywhere. There was also another resurgence of the KKK.

So when you hear about flags and statues coming down, take note of the date given as to how long they had stood. Almost all of them went up in one of these two periods (the Lee statue at the heart of the protests in Charlottesville, VA, went up in 1924; the Confederate Soldier statue toppled by a crowd in Durham, NC, went up in 1925- incidentally, the two peak years of the KKK). Know what that means? It means they are not really about the Civil War at all, they are about white supremacy and opposition to civil rights. And they are on government property. And by the way, that Confederate battle flag that Bree Newsome climbed up that flagpole to take down two years ago? It went up over the SC statehouse in 1962.

About Me

Troy D. Smith was born in the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee in 1968. He has waxed floors, moved furniture, been a lay preacher, and taught high school and college. He writes in a variety of genres, achieving his earliest successes with westerns -his first published short story appeared in 1995 in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine, and he won the Spur Award in 2001 for the novel Bound for the Promise-Land (being a finalist on two other occasions.) He received his PhD in history from the University of Illinois, and is currently teaching history at Tennessee Tech.